Kids just can't help fiddling with the brightness and contrast on their smartphones. That's the result of the latest survey carried out by pollmeisters Ipsos MORI.
According to the poll, the main reason behind two-thirds of 15 to 24-year-olds wanting to change the settings is to improve the picture quality on their devices – …

Not Boffinry?

"Based in Loughborough, their team consists of biologists and developers, respectively specialising in the human eye and visual interfaces. They have modelled the human retina as a digital signal processor and used the resulting technology to produce display and camera systems."

Wow. One of those IP tech companies George Osborne wants to see more of

users are more intelligent

I seldom fiddle with brightness, but when I do I take a choice: I trade display quality for battery life. If the fancy tech needs more processor cycles to save some nits at constant display quality that is nice to improve daylight readability, or even preserve quality at lower backlight rates, but there is no way it is as efficient as dialing down backlight to 'barely readable' mode.

The real question is:

Brightness doesn't go low enough on most devices. Turning them on in a dark place is still similar to looking into the end of a lightsabre when switching it on...

Also, I feel the ambient light sensors dont quite work as intended when they're on fhe front of the devices. Either I myself place the sensor in shadow, or they pick up something bright behind me, or pick up dark behind me, and completely ignore what is, from my point of view, the background against which the display's brightness should match.

brightness

>Brightness doesn't go low enough on most devices. Turning them on in a dark place is still similar to looking into the end of a lightsabre when switching it on...

There are a few apps for oled phones which drop the brighness levels to "superdark" - perfect for pitch black but utterly useless for reading with the light on. Thankfully the brightness can go upwards from there.